Liberation (88 page)

 

July 25.
152¼. We had lunch with Marti Stevens. Joseph Cotten, Patricia Medina,
¹⁰⁸
Jean Feldman
¹⁰⁹
and Tony Santoro were there. We stayed home in the evening.

 

July 26.
150¾. We ran down to the beach, went in water. Don had supper with his parents. He and I went to see
The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea
(Kris Kristofferson, Sarah Miles).

 

July 27.
151½. We had supper with Marti Stevens at her house. Saw John Kniest at Pelican Records about recording. Don drew me for the jacket of
Christopher and His Kind
.

 

July 28.
152¼. Don drew me for the jacket of
Christopher and His Kind
. Saw Chetanananda at Vedanta Place. We ate at home.

 

July 29.
151¼. We ran down to the beach and went in the water. Brian Finney came to see me. We took Jim Gates and Warren Neal to dinner at the Bellevue.

 

July 30.
151¾. We ran down to the beach and went in the water. We ate at home and watched
Mr. Lucky
on T.V.

 

July 31.
151¾. We ran down to the beach and went in the water. We saw Ingmar Bergman's
Face to Face
(Liv Ullmann) with Billy Al Bengston and Penny Little, then we all had dinner at the Masukawa. Don drew Doug Chapin.

August 1, 1976–June 9, 1980

August 1.
We have settled down, more or less, into the routine of discomfort caused by the building—or better say, work in suspension. Don's new studio's still only a skeleton but it looks awfully big from the road below; almost bigger than The Casa itself.

Terrific resentment against the architect and the contractor— [. . .] Carl Day and that slob Walter Winslow with his piggish crew who leave beer cans on the roof and all over the place. (One exception, cute, boyish Gary who works stripped to the waist and has softening smiles to calm our annoyance when he fills the back porch so full of tools that you can't open the closets.) We revenge ourselves by keeping the house doors locked, so none of them can use the bathrooms any more. Our excuse is a lie: that the police have told us we must do this. But we do both strongly suspect that some workman, having cased the place, tipped off friends who were the actual burglars. One's resentment against a burglary is against the intrusion far more than the loss of property. As somebody so rightly said, it's a rape.

Four days of gorgeous beach weather in a row; we've been in the water every day.

Have been timing and cutting the passages I am to record for Pelican Records—they chose the bits from
Sally Bowles
,
A Single Man
and “Anselm Oakes”; the good taste shown by this last choice surprised me.
¹

 

August 8.
Four more days of sea and beach in a row. Jonathan Fryer has just turned up again. He is much more attractive than he used to be; he has the body of a big strong girl. I gave him the typescript of
Christopher and His Kind
to read.

A bit of paper has been lying on my desk for months. On it I have written:

 

For the homosexual, as long as he lives under the heterosexual dictatorship, the act of love must be, to some extent, an act of defiance, a political act. This, of course, makes him feel apologetic and slightly ridiculous. That can't be helped. The alternative is for him to feel that he is yielding to the compulsion of a vice, and that he is therefore dirty and low. That is how the dictatorship wants him to feel.

 

I have copied this here so I can throw the paper away. It isn't clearly expressed but it means something important to me.

 

August 17.
Today I finished correcting the first set of proofs. I don't know what I feel about the book. Jonathan Fryer didn't seem exactly shattered by it, but then he's so enigmatic. Bill Scobie called it “a cliffhanger” approvingly, but thinks that I shall be attacked for worrying about my private life instead of the Nazis, which doesn't seem perceptive, since the two were so closely interrelated.

We have now put the Hilldale property up for sale, and so are hoping to ditch our demon tenants. The builders are still very much with us. They block the back porch every night with their heavy dirty tools.

I'm consistently failing to meditate properly. And yet I feel that Swami is very much “there,” in a sense that he never was while he was alive. He knows everything now, I say to myself; there is no concealment. And this is reassuring. It puts my “sins” and “impurity” in a proper perspective. What do they matter, as long as I don't forget him?

 

August 27.
So now I'm seventy-two. A happy peaceful birthday with my darling yesterday and a birthday supper in bed; salmon cakes and champagne. I dreamt that I was shot dead by a firing squad—I forget why—and that I then went around telling everybody that there was nothing to it, it didn't hurt and it wasn't at all unpleasant, and I didn't feel any different after it had happened. Was this whistling in the dark?

I think about death more and more—I prod myself into thinking about it; and always the thought brings me to the
almost
certainty that Swami will be present with me, when it comes.

A very attractive young endodontic dentist named Thomas Rauth, recommended by Dr. Kurtzman, told me today that my upper left first molar won't hold together much longer. It is the anchor tooth for that side of my bridgework. Luckily, there is another molar behind it which is in better condition. Otherwise, I might have to have one of those upper plates which only remain in place by sticking to the roof of your mouth.

Don is out dancing tonight with the Nick Wilder bunch— Gregory Evans, etc. Around 10:30, a young man named Gene Hendrickson called me long distance from Albuquerque. Last March he sent me a piece called “Memories of a Queer Life,” which I rather liked, and another called “The Feeling of Negentropy,” which bored me. He tried to explain negentropy
²
to me, but I hadn't turned off the T.V. and simply could not concentrate. We spent nearly an hour chatting with great good humor.

 

September 7.
Well, my upper left first molar is out and Labor Day (yesterday) is over, thank God. Now we enter the beautiful fall– winter season of work. I still can't make up my mind whether or not I want to start editing my 1939–1944 diaries, to make a sequel to
Christopher and His Kind
. Don insists that they mustn't be cut, or even much commented on—otherwise, he says, they will lose their flavor. But the trouble is, there are so many passages which could cause offence to people still alive.

It has also come to me that I should write something about Swami, without delay. Not a formal biography, beginning at the beginning. I think I should start now—or, at any rate, with his death—and then keep looking back. The difficulty is that this kind of portrait lends itself to posing; the author is tempted at every point to present himself as the disciple the guru loved, the disciple who betrayed him, the disciple who helped him most, the disciple who was the lowest, morally, of them all and therefore avoided being a hypocrite, like all the others. . . . Still and all, even as I wrote the above sentences, I began to feel a stirring excitement: Yes, yes, this
is
something. Why shouldn't I at least try it? What can I lose? At worst, it'll be an unusual document. I am bound to say a few interesting things on the subject.

More about this, I hope, in the days to follow.

On the evening of Sunday the 5th, we were about to sit down to dinner with Nick Wilder, Gregory Evans, Mo [McDermott], Mark Lipscom[b], Carlos Sagui and John Ladner, when a terrific thunderstorm burst over the Canyon. I think the telephone pole outside the house was struck; anyhow, it started to spurt a little crackling flame and all our lights went out. They weren't put back on again until yesterday afternoon. When the lightning struck, nobody panicked—thanks to a subnormal state of awareness in some cases, due to drink, pot or nature, and a sanguine temperament in others. Indeed, this rather made our evening, which was lit by candle stumps.

 

September 20.
Don, talking about drawing a portrait: “The whole point is setting up this thing—these two idiots looking at each other. It has all the earmarks of significance and at the same time it's absurd—and it's the absurdity which is
so marvellous
!”

A strange dark, perhaps Asian, woman puts in several sessions of chanting every day, in the bushes on the slope below number 147, Elsa's house. She uses what used to be a hideaway set up by the boys and girls from one of the houses on the other side of Adelaide Drive, to smoke pot in, presumably, and screw. The woman has a suitcase, which I've seen lying on the pathway which runs along the top of the slope, and sometimes she spreads clothes on the surrounding bushes—to air them out, I suppose. She chants, or, rather, shouts loudly enough to be tiresome and distracting when the wind is blowing her voice toward us and we are having our own morning sit. One day, it seemed to me that she was repeating “egotism . . . egotism . . . egotism.” But I couldn't be sure, and certainly the words vary. She may belong to the Nichiren Shoshu or some similar sect which teaches you how to chant to obtain a lover or a Lincoln Continental. I feel inclined to leave a note in her nest, reminding her that Christ told us to pray in secret.

 

September 22.
The Autumnal Equinox. (Just as I was starting to type those words—at about 3:23 p.m.—the velvet case containing the miniature of Richard as a child, which he gave me when I was at Wyberslegh last June, fell off my desk and damaged itself even more than it was already. But the prop, which I hadn't been using, is still intact. So I pulled the doors of the case off and now it looks and stands much better without them. An omen? Of what?)

I am really only writing today because I want to make a token act of work on this auspicious date. There's nothing special to report. At present, a door-installing man is in the studio. We are promised the stairs and the deck next week. Still no plumbing and no electricity. Both Don and I find Walter Winslow the contractor so repulsive that we cannot bring ourselves to look at him while we're talking to him.

I had meant to begin my memoir of Swami today, but that would be just a compulsive gesture. What I will do, until I do actually begin, is to discuss the project with myself, here.

For example: I originally thought I would start with getting the news of Swami's death by phone from Jim Gates at Gavin's house in Tangier, the day after our arrival from London. But I feel that this approach would have a certain vulgarity. Because it would necessarily hit a note of drama. . . . No, I should begin at the very beginning, quite undramatically. I should have to begin with Gerald Heard and, in fact, follow the line of my diary. I must be shown to have met Swami
through
Gerald—not merely in the sense that Gerald introduced me to him, but in the sense that Gerald presented him, Gerald's image of him, to me. At first, I certainly saw Swami through Gerald's eyes.

Another thing I realize is that I must read right through my diaries—all of them, down to the present day, in order to get an overview. By an overview, I mean a sense of how the relationship between these two people, Swami and me, developed and changed. In this way, I shall probably find out a great deal which I don't know, am not aware of, yet. Okay, good, that's how I'll begin.

 

October 14.
Have just finished reading the two typewritten diary volumes, 1939 through 1944. There is a great deal of good material in them but I still feel it would be a mistake to publish them in their present form. Not only because so many of those written about are still living. Because the material itself is too
dense
. There are so many minor characters whose portraits follow each other boringly, I fear. For example, the people at the Vedanta Center, and the people at the Haverford refugee hostel. One virtue of the material used in
Christopher and His Kind
is that it composed much more easily into the form of a nonfictitious novel. Its major characters are most of them extremely active and there is a sense, all through the narrative, of outside menace—from The Others in general and the Nazis in particular. The major characters in the 1939–1944 material are both contemplatives rather than actives— Swami and Gerald Heard—and there is very little sense of outside menace, even though the war is on during nearly all of the period.

I come back, therefore, to the feeling that I should write exclusively about Swami. But, as yet, I don't know how to do that. I can't strike the right tone. I am certainly not aiming to write a biography. What I should try for is a highly subjective memoir—always stressing the idea that what I am describing is a personal impression, a strictly limited glimpse of a character very different from myself and therefore often quite mysterious to me. Without being fake humble, I should also—even for purely artistic reasons—stress the materialistic, gross, lustful, worldly side of myself—but without making Swami appear merely “better” than me. The real artistic problem is to find a way to do that.

Now that Don's studio has been more or less hammered together, the poor thing looks as crude as Frankenstein's monster; its thick graceless skeleton is held together by oversize bolts. It's quite clear that both Day and Winslow are amateurs. Day, having attached the stairway lights in an unreachable position, actually suggested that we should climb a nearby tree when we wanted to change the bulbs in them. (There was a don't-care impudence in the way he said this.) Winslow is just a slob, trying to get by with his miserable fudging and lack of foresight. What they can't take away from us—unless they build skyscrapers opposite—is our magnificent view, which is about a third better from the upper floor of the studio than it is from the balcony of the house.

 

October 15.
I was talking to Barada on the phone this morning, because I'll be coming up to the Santa Barbara convent on Sunday to read. She told me that they would all like Vandanananda to return here and be head of the Hollywood center. I hadn't heard this before. Barada also told me that Swami, shortly before he died, told Abhaya that it would be a good thing if Vandanananda succeeded him. Previously, he had been determined that Vandanananda
shouldn't
succeed him and had even stated this in his will.

I then asked Barada if she believed that Vandanananda had really had affairs with women in the congregation. She wouldn't quite admit this, but she said that Vandanananda had been denounced to Swami by two women who were jealous of each other because of Vandanananda—adding “where there's smoke there's fire.”

The woman who chants in the bushes below us had a passionate solo argument this morning, at the top of her voice, just as it was getting light. Maybe she was addressing her enemies. She kept shouting, “It's not happening, it's not happening, it's not happening!”

 

October 16.
Yesterday afternoon, I spent nearly two hours with Dr. Elsie Giorgi—whom Gavin discovered years ago and the Boormans more recently—telling her my medical history and being examined, as part of a checkup. I shall hear more when my blood and urine samples have been tested, next week.